Absolutely Nuts

by Deana Chadwell7/27/17
That phrase – absolutely nuts – pops into my head often when I read or hear the opinions of my leftist friends and acquaintances. Then I think about that word absolutely, and I realize that’s the problem – the left denounces absolutes, but leftist thought is thoroughly sodden with them.

I am conservative and Christian – a real pre-modernist. I believe in absolute truth, in the absolute existence of God, and that the Bible is unquestionably the Word of that God. I believe the basic concept of morality as absolute – the liberal situation ethics is nonsensical and the Ten Commandments are just as relevant now as they were 3500 years ago. I am sure that Christ’s mandate to love each other is an absolute. When Christ said, “I am the way, the truth, and the light. No man comes to the Father but through me,” He was speaking in absolutes.

The left-wing post-modernists mock all the above. I have my truth; they have theirs. God is whatever a person wants him to be. The Bible is just an old book written by a bunch of ancient, dead men. Morality needs to keep up with the times. Love should be dependent on one’s race and political point of view. Ones’ sex is not tied to biological reality.

But leftists are not nearly as “open minded” as they claim. For all their trumpeting of liberal tolerance, they actually lean heavily on their own version of fundamentals.

They are absolutely dug in on their ideas – even the ones that obviously need softening and mitigating. Let’s look at tolerance. That’s at the top of their must-do list; must be open and accepting of everyone’s post-modern beliefs. Now, tolerance is a noble virtue – to an extent. If my neighbor is an atheist, it is a virtue to be polite to him, to love and care for him, to get to know him. But what if my neighbor is a pedophile? What if he lures young boys to his house and I know what he’s up to? Should my tolerance continue? The left would say yes. Tolerance is an absolute in their world. Should I tolerate Muslim men harassing young women in my community? Plotting to blow up my church? Mutilating their own daughters? Is there no line to be drawn here?

Diversity, another leftist absolute, is the other side of the tolerance coin. Everyone else’s culture is absolutely better than anything American — even though it’s not. It is true that America is an amazing amalgam of dozens of cultures, partially because of assimilation, and partly because of intermarriage. I am Danish-Czech-Swiss-Dutch-English, etc. I am married to an English Luxembourgian. We have Irish grandchildren. Most of us are mongrels of one kind or another. And we eat Italian, Mexican, Chinese, Mongolian, and Thai food. Our language is a polyglot affair filled with bits and pieces from hundreds of languages. We are richer for it.

But the liberal doesn’t want us to appreciate our multifaceted culture; we are to denigrate it and prefer the cultures of those who come here illegally. We are to spend a large portion of our children’s education teaching them about other cultures and doing so without any censure of the behaviors of those other societies. If the Netsilik Eskimos want to put their elderly out on ice floes to drift off into a cold, lonely death, then that’s okay. If the Maasai want to yank out the canine teeth of their toddlers then we shouldn’t judge. If it’s part of Sharia law that a man can beat his wife, then what’s wrong with that? The left has sacrificed all moral judgment at the feet of the god of diversity.

The best mankind can do on his own is to fake uprightness (this goes for all of us – Christians included) or to declare that our sins aren’t sins, which changes their status not at all…

They see their right to speak their minds as absolute, never mind how incendiary or untrue. They see their right to believe what they want as such an absolute that it extends to an imagined right of protection from any facts or ideas that go against their beliefs. Even the most diehard conservative Constitutionalist knows that all of our rights have limitations. I can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater; I can’t practice a religion that requires human sacrifice; I can’t set up a loaded Gatling gun in my front yard; and I understand that under certain circumstances the government has to be able to tap phones and read emails. The liberal, however, sees his own rights as absolutes and one of those rights is to demand that government cushion his entire earthly existence regardless of how that affects the rights of others.

Now, I admitted that my beliefs are also unqualified, so where do I get off lambasting the leftists? That’s not hard to explain.

Unlike the left, I have no outward quarrel with absolutes. In fact the things I see as irrefutable and eternal, are, in fact irrefutable and eternal.

God, the Judeo-Christian, triune God, being outside of both time and space, is an absolute. All we know of science and history underscores that as fact. God is the uncaused, immutable Cause who pre-existed all of both human and angelic existence. The left sees godness as merely a misguided human construct, but the evidence makes that nonsense. Extra-biblical verification shows that man has been aware of the Godhead from the earliest times – ancient Chinese pictographs, universal flood stories in over 250 cultures, etc.

Because God is perfect righteousness and perfect justice, His law is perfect and therefore does not need readjusting to 21st century human standards. Good and evil have not changed. Human nature has not changed. History bears witness to this — Darwinism notwithstanding, mankind is still a mess.

We have not outgrown our inherited original sin – the 20th century was the bloodiest in all of human history and the 21st is shaping up to be even worse. The best mankind can do on his own is to fake uprightness (this goes for all of us – Christians included) or to declare that our sins aren’t sins, which changes their status not at all, mitigates their devastating effect on human society not one iota.

And lastly, truth is true or it isn’t truth. Now, it’s correct that given a half-dozen witnesses to an event you’ll end up with a half-dozen versions of the same event, but that doesn’t mean that an actual event didn’t take place. In short, I believe in reality. Can we always find the absolute truth, be totally aware of the truth. No, partly because, as Jack Nicholson’s character said in A Few Good Men, “You can’t handle the truth!” Reality is often a bitter pill.

Reality demands that we face our own imperfections and also face God’s perfections and our ultimate incompatibility with Him. It requires that we accept the fact that the problem has been solved for us. That’s pretty hard on our over-developed egos, but it is true in the most absolute sense. “No man comes to the Father but my me.” Jesus Christ absolutely allowed Himself to be nailed to the cross in order to build a bridge from us to God Almighty. There was nothing wishy-washy there.

The left’s failure to understand that avoiding these uncomfortable absolutes divorces us from reality, and leaves us trying to stand and move forward with our feet stuck in the quicksand of fuzzy, nonsensical assumptions. It can make us absolutely nuts.

About Deana Chadwell

I have spent my life teaching young people how to read and write and appreciate the wonder of words. I have worked with high school students and currently teach writing at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. I have spent more than forty years studying the Bible, theology, and apologetics and that finds its way into my writing whether I'm blogging about my experiences or my opinions. I have two and a half moldering novels, stacks of essays, hundreds of poems, some which have won state and national prizes. All that writing -- and more keeps popping up -- needs a home with a big plate glass window; it needs air; it needs a conversation.
I am also an artist who works with cloth, yarn, beads, gourds, polymer clay, paint, and photography. And I make soap.

10 Responses to Absolutely Nuts

The key is that leftists, for all their prating about tolerance, are totally intolerant of differing views, and an increasing number see such views as verbal violence which justifies any real violence in response.

God kicked us out of The Garden, (His presents), and we have been trying to get our pay backs ever since. He loved us ingrates so much, He sent His only son to let us back in to The Garden. But in our arrogance, we cannot just accept the gift, so the left uses this human failing to push Satan’s agenda, useful childish idiots that they are.

The path of intolerance is being judgmental. Judgmentalism usually stems from ignorance, from an irrational fear of “the other” that you haven’t gotten to know better. We must build bridges, not barriers.

I am such a likable person I can overcome prejudice, especially from people-of-color. And if they have some reticence about me it’s due to past oppression by the unenlightened intolerant who came before it. And such lingering resentment that exists is certainly a barrier I can overcome by being tolerant, non-judgmental, and sharing our common humanity.

I sometimes must wear thick black underwear because the sun shines so brightly out of my ass, I often find it hard to fall asleep at night.

Too bad no leftist will see that — and if any did, they’d think you were being straight instead of satirical. And they’ll never see that they who deprecate being judgmental (about behavior) are extremely judgmental about views. Thought crimes are what matter to them.

Conservatives/Christians believe in an external locus of control for the Ultimate stuff while honoring and expecting an internal locus of control (aka “personal responsibility”) for all the smaller stuff.

Progressives/Leftist believe in no Ultimate but they do believe in an external locus. However, this locus of control is located in government. The internal locus of control is not honored outside of lip service for reducing one’s carbon footprint, etc.

Conservatives believe that their Ultimate commits them to walking a better path. Progressives believe that by supporting the Big Project of Utopian Government that all their little sins are thus sanctioned and indulged.

Christians and Muslims have this belief in an external locus of control for the Ultimate. The difference is that Christians believe it is man’s duty to try to imitate God in his goodness. For Muslims, Allah is simply an excuse to act beastly in this lifetime.

The yute I talked to recently (who I mentioned earlier or elsewhere) showed me clearly the bankruptcy of his morality. He would say nary a word against Islam but had a proper Progressive hate for Catholics.

People should not be beastly. We can commend at least the idea of tolerance, non-violence, working out our problems peacefully, etc. But when the Good is denigrated and the bad is protected — which is a character of the Left — then we need to look beyond their delusions and understand the deception and cult programming that is occurring. There is a deep moral bankruptcy that operates on and survives by self-flattery.

Note that both Christians and progressives have a faith that must be adhered to for salvation. For Christians, this is faith in the Holy Trinity and the salvation is in the afterlife. For progressives, this is espousal of a litany of Causes and salvation is approval by fellow leftists and government benefits as needed.

For Christians, this is faith in the Holy Trinity and the salvation is in the afterlife.

You are correct, and I won’t dispute that. But I will say I hope Christianity is about a hell of a lot more than being able to catch what HBO will be putting on TV in a billion years, aka “living forever.” If that’s the main draw, then it’s just another brand of prosperity gospel, in my opinion, and there’s then no right to poke fun at those who want this particular advantage (perhaps monetary) as opposed to that particular advantage with god as one’s personal butler in either case.

In a sense, Progressivism’s deification of Mother Earth does have the earmarks of a higher cause. This is surely one reason it has such a draw with people. While their fathers and mothers were promising a heavenly utopia (or scaring people with hell), they were given a cause (often wrapped up inside Christianity itself) with the benefit of both tangible implications (cleaner water) and semi-transcendent ones (saving the planet).

In my not very humble opinion, Christians themselves, by degrading their religion into something simplistic, did much to set us on the path we are now. In many ways, Progressivism is a rejection of the hypocrisy of one’s forefathers.

It’s also doubly simplistic itself, calling good evil and evil good. We’d do well to read C.S. Lewis, Thomas Aquinas, and practice our lives more in the style of St. Francis. Christianity had already been shifted into a mortally materialist mode long before Nancy Pelosi.

I think it’s much more important to hear “I will be good” or “I will do good” then fixating on the desire to live forever. We aren’t in control of that. But we do have some control over the little slice of life we’ve been given. Shall we align with something good (carry our cross) or just schlep the moments away on one distraction after another?

Excellent piece. One error however: You quote the Lord Jesus Christ as saying: When Christ said, ““I am the way, the truth, and the light. No man comes to the Father but through me,” He was speaking in absolutes.” He actually said “I am the way, the truth and the life (Greek word: zoe). Thank you for your efforts in Stubborn Things.